Since your first comment, which was rational but beside the point, I havent a clue what you are on about, or why.

And yet you argue necessarily to keep taxes high.

“Likewise, in post 43…”

Perverse incentives exist. The problems with welfare to work are well known and measureable. Despite this upward mobility problem, you choose to support our current tax mess based on umms, ahhs and maybes.

At the risk of being rude, Mark, I do not intend to respond to your arguments and challenges as your posts misrepresent my earlier arguments.

For instance, in post 36 you say: “You assert that success, individual choice and increased economic welfare are all harmful to us…”. Where have I said, argued or implied any of this? At most I have argued that increased individual choice does not necessarily enhance welfare. Everything beyond that is a straw man of your fertile imaginations’s creation.

Likewise, in post 43, you seek to characterise my argument as being that “perverse incentives are good”. Yet the statement that you derived this interpretation from said that “it is another argument again as to whether disincentives against trimming the size of government are a good or bad thing”.

Now, I know there is a tendency among Libertarians to interpret written statements on the basis of what they think the author meant to say, or would have meant to say if he or she had thought harder about it, rather than what his or her words actually do say. Call me a pedant, but in arguments I typically respond to what people write, rather than what I might wish they had written. I would suggest that this principle warrants reciprocal application.

If people want to be happy and wasteful, they are going to blow $120k on their kids wedding or on drugs and call girls. A quick glance in last weeks obituaries or a stroll down Collins Street on Saturday afternoon shows as much.

They are not going to give $90k to the State and Federal Treasuries, and then destroy the remaining $30k in specie.

Perverse incentives are good? Once I worked as an electoral worker and a guy asked me who the Liberal candidate was. After telling him I couldn’t help fill out the ballot and said which party each candidate belonged to, he remarked that he was voting for the State liberal candidate because John Howard upped his welfare payments.

RS’s continuing claim that we are better off because of happiness studies is piffle. Think about the veil of ignorance – he doesn’t care what circumstances he is born into, as long as the group (survey sample) is on aggregate, happy. His proof for being taxed into happiness is that there is a diminishing return to income earning happiness. This doesn’t show a negative or non-existent relationship, just a statistically significant but low impact positive relationship.

So:

1. RS finds that there is diminishing returns to income earning happiness.

2. He/she misinterprets this as a negative relationship between disposable incomes and happiness.

3. He/she assumes that everyone has a welfare increase (or there is an optimal welfare position) by being made less well off by earning lower productivity at a higher tax rate whilst being more wasteful in an aggregate sense.

4. Perverse incentives are good.

5. The veil of ignorance doesn’t matter. Nor does upward mobility witnessed by the positive judgement on perverse incentives. Only people like him who like their jobs and don’t want to earn any more. But by his own definition, his success makes him a dependent mess.

PS: Your (2) didn’t happen.

Of course I could just point you to pommygranate -surely the original author of a text more than anyone else knows what he meant to say in a text?

But setting that aside for a moment because you will say that it’s too convenient to accept the direct testimony of the author of the text about his actual intentions, my analysis at 31 is open to you to refute and Jim Fryar makes the same point at 38.

So now we’ve had
1) converging textual analysis from 2 different people
2) your own acknowledgement that my use of the term ‘totally dependent’ is pretty conventional
3) the author’s own testimony

If you accept none of these then what the hell are you arguing about? Your claim that pommy meant X when everyone else including pommy says he meant Y is completely unfalsifiable.

You might as well start composing a poem by randomly selecting bits of pommy’s text. I think we’ve exhausted any potential for rational argmentation here.

Its curious that you find me a “tedious pedant”, pommygranate, because in times gone by when I have been seen by Libertarians to slightly misrepresent one of their nostrums, I have been taken to task – in detail, at length, and repeatedly – by outraged members of your sect. So, perhaps whether a correction is seen as “tedious pedantry” or “a careful eye for detail and precision” simply depends on whether the incorrect statement aligns or conflicts with your starting world view.

The only point I made, and sought to make, in my initial post was that Bloodypommy’s statement is incorrect. The argument I put forward supporting my conclusion remains unrebutted, sofar as I can ascertain, and my subsequent explanation of how statements such as Bloodypommy’s tie in with common Libertarian prejudices provides, I submit, a valid reason for me to raise it on this blog site.

Why Jason should then suggest that my defence of that point is “beside the point”, other than as a mechanism to deflect attention from the shortcomings in his own initial attempt to rebutt me, is not immediately clear.

Be that as it may, Jason moves quickly on to focus on what he calls “the gist of the article” – not to be confused with “the vibe of the thing”, presumably. Of course, I never sought to address (or disagree with) the thrust of Bloodypommy’s argument. In fact, I happen to agree with it.

Even so, the fact that many of those 47% are not dependent on government for “a living”, but only for ‘their current source of income’, is relevant for understanding the extent to which political parties would be willing to trim the size of the State given the number of people who (currently) depend on it. Specifically, if all those 47% did indeed face unemployment and destitution in the absence of State employ, then they would indeed have extremely strong financial reasons to vote against parties with such an agenda. But when one realises that many public servants do in fact have employment prospects outside the public sector, such electoral disincentives to trimming the size of the State must be seen to be weaker.

Naturally, it is another argument again as to whether disincentives against trimming the size of government are a good or bad thing.

The point Pommy was making was that with this degree of vested interest it would be virtually impossible to run a successful political campaign based on cutting public spending.

Whether people can get another job, if they lose the current one is irrelevant, the relevant point is whether they will vote to loose that job or that benefit. My contention is that until the status quo skews the economy to the point of disaster, no they wont.

I have a well-paid job but could do about 50% better if I were to take one further away, which would ironically be easier than what I do now. I do not choose to do so as the current job suits my personal life better. I don’t want to loose my job.

Nor does any public servant. They may consider leaving that job and taking another but they would want to do it by choice in their own time, and preferably with the new job ready to move in to. They would not vote for the insecurity of not having a job at all and having to look for one, even if they were certain in their own mind that they could get one.

Put the semantic dribble aside, dependant, reliant, what ever term you want to use, your income is what you depend on for a living, and no one wants to put that under threat.